


The Stan Wrong Song

by maxvsthefuture



Category: Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, Burns, Carjacking, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Emetophobia, Gen, Gun Violence, Kidnapping, M/M, Reckless Driving, Vomit, car theft, child endangerment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-24 03:45:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8355754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maxvsthefuture/pseuds/maxvsthefuture
Summary: A month after Ford's disappearance, Stanley encounters a device which could save his brother, and an attempt to con its owner begins. Absolutely everything goes wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

> (Mature rating is for language. Complete/ finished story.)

\- - - - - - - p a r t - o n e - - - - - - -

Stanley had been wearing his missing twin brother’s name for a month now, and the fit was terrible when people called him by it. Stuttered with a question mark at the end, he heard it across the Murder Hut’s front room that morning, and he almost winced. It was easy to spot the speaker as the rest of the tour crowd was heading out the front door. The guy wore a t-shirt from Stan’s brother’s dream college, another awkward fit. Old and stained beneath a red winter jacket. Before the guy approached, he set down a two-year-old girl he’d been carrying during the tour, not much bigger than Shermie had been back when Stanley left home. Combine the sound of the name ‘Ford’ with the West Coast Tech tee and the flashbacks the little girl inspired, do the math, and everything which followed would almost make sense.  
“F-Ford Pines?” The guy cracked a grin. “Damn, motherfucker, I knew you'd waste all your grant money like this,” he gloated lightly. Personal space wasn’t a concept he proved to be familiar with the closer he came to Stan, and he reeked like an ongoing series of benders and hangovers. “The universe will never support your ‘anomaly’ theory-- yyy-you thought science would tell you you’re special or some shit, and now you’re a tour guide.”  
Time to be a conman. “That’s rich coming from a tourist,” Stan countered with a raised brow, slinging an arm over the guy’s slim shoulders in a buddy-buddy gesture. “Where do I know you from, pal?”  
Accepting the embrace and easily settling into it, the guy’s expression was curious. He cast a shifty glance around the Murder Hut, checking to see that he and his toddler were the only remaining guests before replying. “W-ww-we worked together, Ford. Reagan? Project Meatpuppet?” He asked in a hushed tone. “What, d-did I really not make an impression?”  
“... Lemme think...” Given the circumstances, Stan wasn’t as quick as he would’ve liked to be. Sure, the haze hanging over this guy seemed pretty thick, but what if he saw through this case of identity theft?  
“I’m Rick! Ricardo Sanchez, y-you were there when I quit and it was fucking awesome! I can’t believe anyone would forget that, dawg.”

With a blink, Stan put on his poker face. He was mentally placing his bets. 1: the first word Rick’s little girl mastered would end up being ‘fuck’. 2: Stanley would successfully sell the ‘I am actually my missing twin brother Stanford’ act to this guy. He knew he was betting against the odds with that second one, but in all fairness he rarely lost at these sorts of games.  
“Rick! Right! The one who swore a lot, back when we worked on Project Meatball--”  
“--Meatpuppet,” the jerkface corrected. “But I did make Ronald say ‘lick my balls’ that one time, so... close enough.”  
“Hah! That’s some classic Rick right there,” Stan laughed. He tried to sell his look of recollection and recognition to the guy like it was a leftover Sham Total from his days of entrepreneurship on Glass Shard Beach. “So what brings ya to my neck of the woods, pal?”

Woods, literally. Out in the forest where Ford’s cabin stood, morning light filtered through spiny pine and cedar branches, glinting off the soft snow which blanketed the ground. A mule deer grazed in the long shadows of the trees outside. It was New Year’s Eve, 1982, early in the day. Suddenly a neon green light burst through the cabin’s windows. Inside, Stanley’s question hung unanswered.  
“Beth, h-holy shit!”

Covered in drool, there was an object in the two-year-old girl’s tiny hands. It was a cross between a pistol, a TV remote, and a flashlight. She sat calmly in front of the giant disc of green light the gun had just created with her finger still on the trigger. When Rick dove for Beth he was moving at the speed of ‘my baby is about to fall into a an interdimensional portal’. The speed Stan wish he’d moved at a month ago when this very scene had played out between him and Ford. The speed of life-or-death urgency. In a blink Rick scooped her up, snatched away the strange gun she'd been playing with, and hit a button on it. The portal flickered back out of existence.  
“Holy shit, Bee.” He pocketed the gun, disoriented. For her part, Beth didn't look too surprised by the whole situation, just resting her head against Rick's chest while he held her.

Seeing the portal made Stanley freeze in a way the snow outside couldn’t have. Nearly two months ago, right beneath the cabin where he now stood, he’d seen something sorta like that disc of light… only bigger and brighter and bluer… spiraling inside the giant metal frame which now sat empty and broken down in the real Ford’s lab.  
“Ford? Hey, Stanford?”

At some point, he realized Rick's hand was on his shoulder trying to get his attention back.  
“D-don’t tell me you’ve never seen one of those before.”  
Stanley shook his head. “Yeah.”  
“Yeah?” Rick asked.  
“Yah,” Baby Beth chimed in  
“Yeah, I have.” He ran a hand through his hair and looked at Beth. “Is she okay?”  
“She's--” Rick held his baby out in front of himself awkwardly and she cocked her head as they faced one another. “-- yy-y-you're fine, Bee. You look-- she looks fine, Ford.”  
Slowly shaking his head, Stan scrutinized Beth. “So does your old man always let ya play with portal guns?”  
“It's just a prototype,” said Rick. Unwittingly, he confirmed Stan’s theory: that thing he'd pocketed was just like the thing that had taken the real Ford away… only smaller. And functional.  
“Right, right,” Stan went from shaking his head to nodding. A plan was assembling itself in his head. “Are you okay? Let’s get outta here, Rick.”

 

\- - - - - - - p a r t - t w o - - - - - - -

“I gotta be completely honest with ya, Bethany: this is not a real airplane.”

Her dark brown eyes were transfixed on a fork loaded with warm, fresh waffle. Syrup dripped on the table. With her hat off-- the polite thing to do in a restaurant-- her hair was sticking up all crazylike. Her chubby baby legs dangled from her high-chair, kicking back and forth. She waited for what her new pal Stanley would say next.  
“It's actually a UFO!”

Delighted by the attention and the food, Beth took her bite. Stan grinned. On his own side of the booth, Rick was busy pouring something from a flask into his glass of orange juice.  
“See, I figure once mini humans have been around for ten, maybe twelve years, they're pretty rough and tumble. They’ll bounce back from anything,” Stan mused. As a kid he'd enjoyed plenty of unsupervised, ill-conceived adventures back on good old Glass Shard Beach. If Beth was his kid she'd absolutely be entitled to that kind of fun after she'd had some time to grow. “But in the meantime you gotta feed ‘em regularly. Not just gas station food, either. And you can't let ‘em chew on any seriously hazardous weapons-- baseball bats are okay, but anything that goes ‘boom’ is off-limits. Ya know?”  
Beth was no expert on the English language, but she listened more closely than her dad did. “Mo?” She asked, eyeing the plate of waffles intently. Stanley obliged.  
“You got it, kid. As long as ya don’t waste your time with the ‘p’ word you can get just about anything ya want,” he advised, feeding her another bite.  
Rick raised his brow amusedly. “So y-you’re the, uh, the fucking-- a parenting expert or something.” After making the observation with a half-smile, he took a huge drink spiked by whatever he kept in that flask. The aim here, Stanley’s goal, was to make him good and comfortable. “Which ‘p’ word am I not supposed to teach her?”  
“It’s… ya know… P… L… Eeee-- eugh,” Stan shook his head disgustedly. “I can’t say it.”

Hustling since the tender age of 16, he’d never gotten much mileage out of ‘please’. Asking was an act of faith in the other person-- faith that even if they turned you down they wouldn't turn on you-- and Stanley didn't have that type of faith in this stranger from his brother’s past. Getting the portal gun was going to take the most cynical finesse he could muster, the light touch of a pickpocket. It was his way of saying ‘I know better than you how to get what I need from you’ quietly enough that the other person wouldn't hear it. Sizing Rick up once more, Stan sighed; since the incident with Beth, he'd been touching the inner pocket of his jacket every few minutes to make sure the portal gun was still there. Thus, an ill-conceived scheme was born: gradually win Rick's trust, wait to make a dash for the gun until he was comfortably distracted, and bingo. Stan couldn’t afford to risk failure. If Rick ran off for any reason, that was it. The best shot to save Ford and fix everything would disappear with him.

So there they were: a booth at Greasy’s Diner with a window view of the parking lot. Outside, the Stanmobile waited in the snow slush and gravel. Rick and Beth, as Stan had learned in the process of ushering them out of the Murder Hut, they were living that ‘bus rides and motels’ lifestyle. So they were more than happy to accept a free ride and a free meal. Which begged the question…  
“What brings you two to Gravity Falls, anyway?”  
“Yeah sweetie,” Rick looked to Beth. “What's in Gravity Falls?”  
She perked up. “Snowwwwww! Snow snow snow, snowfakes,” she answered her dad in a clumsy childhood slur.  
“Her mom, m-m-my ex lives out in California. So Bee's never seen snow. It’s something new,” he explained.  
Stanley nodded. Divorce, he guessed. “Ah, I know how it is. My ex wife still misses me.” He paused for a moment, the feint before his left-hook punchline. “... But her aim is gettin’ better!”

Across the diner, the waitress pounded the TV set in the corner with her fist. A rolling wave of static became a game show on the screen. Cash Wheel. Anything with ‘cash’ in the name worked for Stan.  
“You’re a real pal, Susan!” He called, giving her a thumbs-up.  
Rick looked over his shoulder. “Y-yy-you know one time, I watched 32 straight hours of Cash Wheel reruns because that’s who I am as a person at this point.” As he spoke, eyes on the screen, Stanley drew closer, eyes on his jacket pocket. “And there's, i-if you watch there's some math to hitting the cash flood tile.”

Reaching across the table for the gun, Stan was doing some math too; the inches between his hand and the pocket, the milliseconds until Beth made a noise or Rick looked.  
“Th-the trick is--” he turned suddenly. Caught in the act, Stanley thought fast and turned his extended hand into a finger gun gesture.  
“Rick, buddy,” his face split into a conspiratorial grin. “Why don't ya show me how it's done?”

 

\- - - - - - - p a r t - t h r e e - - - - - - -

 

The New Year’s Eve open casting call, that was lucky. The Stanmobile’s topspeed on the road to the studio lot was damn near miraculous. And their place in line wasn't too shabby, either.

Somewhere on the chessboard of blue tile in the crowded TV studio lobby, two disheveled dudes and their pint-sized third conspirator huddled together scheming.  
“Whattaya think, Bethany?” Stanley murmured. “Sixty-forty, you and me?” It came as no surprise to him whatsoever that Rick had handed her off to him-- despite supposedly having scientific knowledge vast enough to keep up with the real Ford Pines, the guy wasn’t exactly a genius where his daughter’s safety was concerned. Between the portal gun incident and the amount of hard liquor Rick had ingested between the diner and the studio, his lack of actual regard for Beth brought Filbrick Pines to mind. Stan let her perch up on his broad shoulders.  
“No way dawg, sh-she takes thirty-three point three repeating. Even split,” Rick interjected. “Everybody gets thirty-three percent.”  
Stan chuckled, glancing at Beth’s dad and then back up at the baby. “He thinks he’s real slick, huh?” Back to Rick. In a reassuring tone, he added “all you gotta worry about is getting up there and winning.”

And staying upright. That was going to be a challenge, Stan thought, watching Rick nod slowly and go for the flask in his pocket. By now the guy was visibly unsteady. Stan put a hand on his shoulder and he scoffed.  
“I-I-I’m all, I-- listen, I am all over this shit.” Confident as he said it, he let Stan help him take his jacket off. He straightened his t-shirt.

Stan froze.

Rick’s jacket was now in his hands.

The portal gun was in the pocket of Rick’s jacket.

Here they were at the crescendo of this con, at the front of the line to get on Cash Wheel, at the end of this scavenger hunt for the perfect moment to make the grab, at nine PM on New Year’s Eve. Stanley froze for just one moment. Recovering immediately-- full-on poker face, following this thing through-- he managed to meet eyes with the genius who’d just been tricked.  
“Alright, pal. Go get rich.”

As he watched a production assistant hustle Rick out to where the cameras and the dumb game show waited, he almost could’ve keeled over from adrenaline. All he had to do was walk away. It was that easy, right?  
“Dad go?” Beth asked. Stan opened his mouth to answer, but shut it. He then realized where the question was coming from.

Looking up at the tiny little girl perched on his shoulders, he saw the hitch in his plan. Manipulation, alright. Impersonation, okay. Theft, any goddamn day of the week... But abandoning a toddler? No way could Stanley Pines bring himself to do that. That was the sort of thing he’d leave for his own father. He would never be Filbrick to a child, and… hell, he didn’t want to be Rick either. Left to his own devices, the guy was probably going to get his daughter killed or traumatized for life, right…? Stan slowly exhaled his thoughts and the whole screwed up situation. When necessary to achieve his goals, he’d talked himself into some pretty serious crimes before. So as he walked out the studio door and the kiddo in the trapper hat perched on his shoulders, he told himself that under these circumstances kidnapping wasn’t as bad as compromising his con by waiting to hand her back to Rick, and it certainly wasn’t as bad as just leaving her to her own devices. This was the only option left if he was serious about saving Ford. Carrying both Beth and the jacket, he made his choice and hopped back in the Stanmobile.

 

\- - - - - - - p a r t - f o u r - - - - - - -

Sweating at his podium, Rick watched the cast and crew of that one gameshow he’d once marathoned for 32 straight hours scramble around in a desperate rush to cut to commercial.  
“What,” he asked the host, speaking into his mic and enunciating like they’d asked him to. “I-i-is it because I called you ‘motherfucker’?” Apparently it was, he decided as a security guard yanked him out of the spotlight. “Y-you’re all being r--” he burped. Okay, yeah, he was capital-d Drunk. Designated-Driver-Don’t-Fail-Me-Now Drunk. “--really backwards with this censorship shit. Swearing is like, i-i-it’s the same thing as punctuation.” The scenery was all a bit runny through his eyes, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t even on the stage anymore, that he’d been kicked off. “Same motherfucking thing!” He yelled.

So, no cash tonight. At least that dude who’d been doing a thin impersonation of Stanford Pines all day would agree that this whole thing was bullshit. All day, Rick had been trying to come up with a clever portmanteau of “Ford” and “Facsimile” to whip out, but in the meantime he was mentally referring to his new acquaintance as “Big Guy”. Big Guy was even better than interdimensional cable. In general, Rick discouraged people from thinking it was possible to get the better of him. But with this dude, he just wanted to sit back, wait, and see where the deception took them both. He stumbled to the backstage snack table and filled a styrofoam cup with black coffee. A little something to clear his head so he could pick Beth and Big Guy out of the crowd. Any second now… Rick looked around, frowning when he realized that while he was stuck trying to find them he had no audience for the Where’s Waldo joke that had just popped into his head. But he’d spot them any second now, right?

Only… he didn’t. He ran around the studio calling their names, then around the parking lot, finally stopping in the space where the Stanmobile should have been parked. His daughter was gone. The panic, the spilled coffee running down his bare arm, and the freezing cold weather shocked his system into a second wind. Clumsily yanking a spare ray gun from his ankle holster, he ran to the first car with a driver that he could find.  
“Th-this is not a traditional carjacking!” He shouted. “Stay in your seat!”

Circling the car with his ray gun aimed at the front windshield, he motioned for the driver to unlock the passenger door. He yanked it open and jumped inside.  
“618 Gopher Road,” he breathlessly instructed the startled, perplexed driver. “Before you ask, yes, I know how to steal a car the right way, but y-yyy-you try driving yourself through the snow blind drunk in the middle of the night through holiday traffic, dawg.”

At gunpoint, Rick’s chauffeur/ carjacking victim was highly motivated to get him to his destination quickly. Traffic laws were broken left and right, but the way Rick saw it, it was better than the guaranteed crash if he were to get behind the wheel that night.

Speeding down a dirt road, he saw the tourist trap ahead, and the borrowed car’s headlights caught a telltale red glint from the Stanmobile parked among the trees. The combination of coffee on top of hard liquor, of hot anxious sweat and overwhelming winter cold, made his stomach turn. Not to mention all the stops and starts and swerves he’d just sat through. He was actively throwing up as he flung the car door open. By the time he made it to the Murder Hut’s locked entrance, there was barf all over his shirt. In the background he heard his ride drive off into the night. He quickly gave up on the door handle and instead found a rock to hurl through the cabin’s window.

Climbing in through the fresh hole he’d made, Rick found himself in a lightless and empty room.

 

\- - - - - - - p a r t - f i v e - - - - - - -

Though abandoned, the machines down in Ford’s secret lab still blinked, hummed, and discharged heat. Did the place look warm and cozy? Nah, but Beth was comfortable. Her new pal had carefully piled her dad’s jacket and his own into a little nest at the foot of a control console. While he paced nearby with that fun invention her dad had made, she snacked from a box of cookies he’d brought her.  
“Do I know how this thing works?” He manically tried to reassure himself. “No, not exactly. But hey! There’s still two hours to figure this out and get Ford back before midnight-- I can do this.” He turned the gun over in his big hands, examining every detail. “The hard part is over.”  
Beth understood approximately 0% of what was happening. When she heard noise coming from outside the secret entrance, she understood even less; for some reason her new friend was too engrossed in his pacing notice the sound, and for even stranger reasons, he blanched when the noise turned out to be nothing but Rick blasting through the entrance with that old laser gun he always hid with an ankle holster. She smiled at the sight of her dad.

Stanley did not.

Stumbling down the stairs to the lab, Rick was a mess of what appeared to be barf, broken glass, and blast residue. His gun was aimed at Stan.  
“Before you say anything I just, just so you know, I... y-you’re extremely fucking lucky that I want an explanation.”

The reason Stan had been hustling since age 16 was a father who didn’t care. And Rick-- Rick who’d almost let his baby shoot herself, had almost let her fall into a portal, and had handed her off to Stan because he was too drunk to think twice about it-- had struck him as a father who didn’t care. But Stan was slightly less certain now.  
“Start with the part where you’re obviously not Stanford Pines and you thought I wouldn’t count your fingers,” Rick continued, taking slow steps towards Beth with his wobbling laser gun pointed at Stan. “And end on the part where you stole my daughter.”  
Actually shocking himself, he accepted that there was no way out of the truth. Someone had finally cornered him into being honest. “Look… two months ago my twin brother Stanford was in a lab accident. And I ain’t a science genius like you two, but I know he’s trapped in another dimension. And a working portal is the only way to bring him back. So when I saw your prototype, I--”  
“W-what’s your actual name?” Rick interrupted.  
“Stanley.”  
“Okay… Stanley? Y-you don’t make a convincing Ford at all. You’re too fucking attractive to be your brother. Why my portal gun and not th-t-the--” he pointed at the massive triangular structure across the lab. “That?”  
“It broke,” Stanley replied. “So I need this thing; otherwise I could spend my whole life trying to fix Ford’s gateway and--”  
“-- What about taking Beth?”  
“I, uh… What else was I supposed to do?”  
Rick furrowed his brow. Stan didn’t expect him to relax his aim at all, but he began to. “Y-you’re pretty nonchalant for a kidnapper.” Cautiously, he knelt to check on Beth.  
“And you’re pretty nonchalant for a parent-- you knew I wasn’t Ford the whole time?”  
“Sh-she likes you, and I wanted to see how long you’d keep that stupid half-assed act up,” Rick explained. He glanced up at Stan. “So I guess neither of us know what the, uh, what the fuck we’re doing.”  
With a sigh that carried thin laughter, Stan agreed. “I guess not.”

Hesitantly, Stan approached the two Sanchezes. He sat down near Beth’s nest so they were all on the same level. Despite the puke stain on his shirt, Rick took one of the cookies from the box Stan had given his daughter.  
“Say peas,” she suggested.  
“No way, Bee,” he raised his brow at her and spoke gently. “W-wwhen you’re an adult you won’t settle your issues that way. People don’t ask-- y-you know you could’ve tried asking, idiot,” he interrupted himself to address Stan, who shrugged and took a cookie. “And then I could’ve told you that the portal gun won’t bring your brother back.”  
“Fuck,” Stanley finally swore in front of Beth.  
“Because it doesn’t target specific dimensions yet,” Rick continued. “But if you convince me to fix Ford’s gateway, that’ll work. And if you want to convince me you should say ‘hey Rick I’m, I’ll be your hot babysitter and y-yyou can have the satisfaction of saving your old rival from his own stupid invention’, talk about the look on his face when we pull him out, that would’ve worked.” Then, an awkward silence while they all did a bit of stress eating, before Rick met Stan’s eyes. “M-maybe it could still work, Stanley.

Then they spent nearly two hours chipping away at each other’s distrust. While Beth peacefully dozed off, Stan spoke of how he’d ended up where he was-- the whole story, from Jersey to Colombia to New Mexico to Oregon. He found Rick some fresh clothes, asking what the full job description of a ‘hot babysitter’ was while Rick changed out of his puke-stained shirt into Stanley’s oversized one. Both coming down from formidable adrenaline highs, they laid on their backs and stared at the ceiling, working out a deal to save Ford together while the sound of Beth’s light snoring in the background calmed their nerves. The clock struck midnight. In an exhausted tangle, they fell asleep side by side.


End file.
